DVDumpster: Alien Arrival
By: Nik S
So it was about that time where I decided to dive into the world of bargain bin DVDs when I stumbled across a cover that just looked like it was trying its absolute hardest to stand out from all the one dollar selections: Alien Arrival. There was just something about it that made it look like it wanted to be more than just a cheap nine o'clock flick on the Syfy channel.
It seems like they were trying to go with a Mad Max looking lead character, all Road Warrior style walking towards the camera. There was just so much happening all over the front cover, with a giant planet in the horizon, flying ships, a glowing gun, and pointy rocks. Everything about this screamed cheap thrills (which of course I was all about).
So it turns out the film is originally called Arrowhead and was first shown at a SciFi Film Festival in 2015, then released in slowly from Australia westward throughout 2016. It was even on Netflix in late 2017. It's an Australian science fiction film that was written, directed, and produced by Jesse O'Brien. The movie is based on a short film O'Brien shot back in 2012 that cost around $600 to make. He decided to start a crowdfunding campaign for a feature version but sadly was unsuccessful. Though he didn't make his mark, it did lead to some industry attention; TV1 gave him $140,000 in funding with an additional $40,000 from a production company made by an acquaintance of his. Filming took over twenty-two days and left him with roughly $1,000 for post-production.
The movie starts off with a little bit of vague background: two generals, Lang and Hatch, try to rise to power. Lang is the victor of their war while Hatch becomes a resistance, striking from the shadows. Lang creates a holiday, Liberation Day, where they publicly execute Hatch supporters. Anyone who isn't killed is sent away to military prisons. Rumors have been spreading that Hatch has been invading the prisons in order to free his men.
We start off in the middle of a man-made pit next to a correctional facility where we're introduced to some of Hatch's supporters. Each prisoner is wearing dirty orange shirts and a face mask that covers their mouth.
Oh, you think darkness is your ally.
This looks slightly familiar.
Close enough.
The prisoners are collecting rocks, piling them together, and moving them to a new location in their pit. The guards seem to be having trouble with a machine that operates a giant fan that all the prisoner's chains are connected to. They get Kye (Mor), one of the prisoners, to fix it (by pretending to use a screwdriver in an open panel). A new prisoner with a tattoo that reads "kill, die, or get out of the sky" is escorted in, which prompts another inmate with the same tattoo to go on a guard killing spree after one punches him in the stomach.
One thing that bugs me in this scene is that none of the guards do anything. He knocks one down by headbutting them, then bashes the skull in of another. They just stand there staring at him, until one decides to turn on the fan machine Kye fixed killing the big dude. It's like in a video game where you hit a non-playable character in front of some town guards, but they do nothing and continue along their route.
Turns out the new prisoner must be Hatch, as a sniper takes out one of the guards. The prisoners see the presumed Hatch hit a guard over the head and everyone starts to riot. Sadly, a young child gets killed the way the big guy does as a Guard tells the machine to drag all of them into the spinning blades. Kye is able to program the machine to stop dragging in most of his fellow inmates, but can't stop it from dragging him; in order to escape from a grizzly death, he has to shoot his leg off.
So with larger cinematic films, there are usually things in the trailer that aren't in the full release. With Alien Arrival, a scene that's on the back cover is changed entirely! Here we have Kye aiming at his leg with a pained grimace. Looks like he's about to bust out his teeth the way he's holding that gun.
While in the movie it looked a little more like this:
One thing this movie likes to do a lot of is jump-cuts, where we jump forward in time. Usually a movie will do this with a transition or shows the audience time has past. In Alien Arrival, it just kind of happens and it's mentioned in passing. Like in our first jump-cut when Kye wakes up with a robotic leg in a random room.
Is that a CPU fan in his ankle? Maybe a GPU? Can his leg run 1080p graphics at 60fps?
In the room with him are discount looking Nick Offerman, Hatch (Redpath), and Jason Statham (Foster). Hatch tells Kye that his father, an important figure to the resistance, has now been caught by Lang's troops and will be executed. Turns out he wants Kye, a skilled pilot, to hijack a technologically advanced plane known as the Arrowhead, steal its data, and use it to rescue his father.
And Kye's new computer leg? It's never referenced again. Honestly you completely forget about it as his legs are always covered with boots and long pants.
If there's one compliment to give this movie, it's how impressive their CGI use is. Sometimes it can stick out like a sore thumb, but it's mostly well done. Everything seems to fit the world that it's in, You can tell it was done with care, and even the practical effects match it from time to time. The practical effects only suffer from costume design, as everyone's outfit seems to be entirely different and not the least bit uniform.
Kye wakes from his stasis pod while on board the Arrowhead, how he got there I think I happened to miss. He's able to find a control panel and hacks into the system. As he gets further into the program, he starts to get a really bad feeling about what he's doing. When he sends the data to Hatch the entire plane shuts down, and everyone still in stasis gets fired down to a nearby moon (Kye on an escape ship with an AI called RE3F).
While exploring the moon, he finds the air is slightly toxic to humans. He stumbles upon the body of Norman Oleander, security chief of the Arrowhead, and a biologist named Tarren. He brings Tarren back to RE3F and is able to activate most of the ship with her biometric data. She is able to quickly determine that Kye is working for Hatch, but he brushes it off as if she's just being paranoid.
It's about here when the theme starts to change dramatically, instead of being a hijacking sci-fi thriller gone wrong, it slowly turns itself into Pitch Black. So Kye can't escape on the escape ship without Tarren's login information. He decides to meet up with her, only to find the rendezvous ship is leaving without them. While Tarren is distracted, Kye gets attacked by some unknown creature and is probably killed by it. It's goofy, pretty much she runs to him, they loosely hold hands, and he's dragged off.
So our main protagonist is dead... or is he? Nah, in like less than seven minutes Tarren stumbles upon his naked body lying in a small burrowed out cave, near what looks to be like an obelisk. Kye feels rather good, saying it's the best he has felt in a long time. They decide to check out the other obelisk they found earlier, as it must contain someone/ Turns out it's the security chief from earlier hiding inside. They drag him back to RE3F and use his biometrics to unlock more features. It's around this time that Tarren randomly recognizes Kye as a soldier who fought alongside her father.
He keeps spouting nonsense that she's not a little kid anymore and can protect herself, which just makes me wonder how old is he? They're about roughly the same age, yet he talks to her like she's a good decade younger. I'm not sure if this was just careless writing, or they were hoping on getting a younger actress or older main hero. Or, maybe, I'm just digging into what he's saying a little too far.
So, unlike Kye, Oleander does not wake up very peacefully. He keeps screaming that they shouldn't be there and that Kye doesn't know the true Hatch. Oleander picks up a nearby rifle and shoots Tarren, which causes Kye to freak out and beat him to a pulp. During the fight, somehow Kye got shot and collapses.
So this movie isn't exactly great at showing time jumps in the story, as they just happen out of the blue. Kye wakes up, picks up some pants that were on the ground, and starts walking. He finds a skeleton with the same helmet as Tarren and has his "I'm a bad-boy with feelings" breakdown.
After him crying over the sand in his fist, he goes back to RE3F and finds out he's been out for about thirty-four days and that his father will be killed in just over a month. So Kye takes it upon himself to try and restore RE3F, which he goes through a brief montage of collecting things and trying to put stuff together. One night he wakes up thinking something is in the ship, and RE3F tells him that he needs to leave. On his walk in the dark, he comes across an alien looking insect about the same size as him, which stresses him out to the point where he becomes one himself.
This movie can honestly not decide what it wants to do with itself. In one moment it's a sci-fi action movie, the next it's a thriller, then it tries to be a body horror. It reminds me of when a kid is writing their own superhero story, and when their protagonist gets into any random situation he somehow has a new power. Think Adam West era Batman with all the tools he had in his belt (i.e. Shark Repellent).
Another jump-cut and we find out Liberation Day happened two days ago, and he goes into sad mode.
No one knows what it's like, to be the sad man.
So RE3F has a theory that death is a more involved part of Kye and Oleander's life cycle. It believes that they can die repeatedly and come back healthier than before. Oleander is probably the bug creature that stalked him the night before, and RE3F thinks that Kye should kill himself to prove his theory right.
Turns out RE3F was right, as Kye can kill himself with little-to-no consequence other than time passes. He uses his leftover body to lure Oleander and shoots it in order to have RE3F observe a tissue sample. Turns out that while the bug has the same DNA, it's not the original.
Because Kye never asked RE3F, he discovers that it knew a lot more of the situation than it led him to believe. It may know how to help him, but couldn't give him the answers because it never had a prompt to answer. It knew that Terran didn't die that night, and ran off in a panic. Kye doesn't hold a grudge though and turns the AI into a floating robot.
The two decide to check out the last known location of Tarren's heartbeat, which is in the underground tunnels. They start mapping their journey, hoping to come across something. They encounter another Oleander bug, which attacks them leaving Kye brutally injured. A loud scream starts to echo through the tunnels, causing Kye to act unusual. Following the screams leads him to his original body (and Oleander's) that are pulsating with a weird light. He suffocates Oleander and screams at his original body.
They found a patch of dirt where it looks like some kind of rocket left, assuring Kye that Tarren must have escaped the moon. While observing his old stuff, he finds that Hatch hid a pulse grenade on him, which has been causing most of RE3F's disturbances. Out of nowhere, the hovering stasis pods crash down onto the moon. It seems Lang's troops were testing a new type of security prison, where time moves quicker in a new orbital field. Where it seems like months to Kye, it's only been about twenty minutes for everyone outside.
Hatch arrives and explains to Kye that what happened wasn't part of his plan, but needed someone to prove that his theories were right. The moon wasn't made but rather found by Lang to be transformed into the ultimate prison. Hatch, corrupt with some kind of power, has kidnapped Tarren and is using her against Kye to get the information he needs from the Arrowhead.
This all starts to anger our protagonist, prompting him to go a little buggy. While he's slowly transforming, it seems Hatch and Kye set traps for each other. Hatch explodes from the pulse grenade, and Kye turns into a weird looking bug creature. He goes a little crazy, killing Hatch's bodyguard, discount Statham who had no lines throughout the film. RE3F and Tarren are able to calm the alien bug Kye, allowing him to turn back to his normal self.
As you probably guessed, Hatch isn't dead and is determined to make sure the moon doesn't get into the wrong hands. The two fight and Kye uses a bug appendage to rip through his opponent's chest. The two survivors, plus RE3F, decide that they will take the Arrowhead and save everyone from Liberation Day. I guess this is supposed to lead up to a sequel, which of me actually hopes that happens. Maybe O'Brien can learn from his mistakes and create something even better.
So the film is able to keep my attention throughout, but it really feels like you need to be patient to even understand anything that's going on. A few scenes I had to watch twice because I just couldn't follow what was happening, and things seem to happen just to push the plot forward.
The movie tries to present Hatch as this powerful force for good at the beginning, but somewhere towards the middle you can just already guess the plot twist is "uh oh, he's the bad guy!" It also would have been nice to put a face to Lang, but maybe they did that to make him seem more like a powerful entity. They also could have done more with Kye, especially since RE3F mentions that every time he's resurrected that he's completely healed and able to regenerate. So maybe if they would have shown us that his leg had grown back, it would have been able to keep the audience's attention more.
There's a lot going on and it feels like O'Brien wanted to cram in as much as he could. It feels like he revisited all of his favorite movies in the sci-fi genre and wanted to put all of his favorite parts into his creation. Because of this, everything just doesn't feel fleshed out at all. There are way too many themes and genres interconnecting when only one or two would work just fine for this. Heck, the writing worked just fine letting the audience get to know Kye and if some of that was used for the other characters (or plot) then things probably would have run smoother.
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